Doug Mertz: profile of the actor, director, coach

No one sane is going to argue that live theatre shouldn’t be relevant, topical, contemporary. The play that opens Thursday, Jan. 24 in the Shadow Theatre season is all of the above. Evie’s Waltz couldn’t be more all of the above. The news from a little town in Connecticut has seen to that.

Doug Mertz’s first reaction was “Oh my gawd, we can’t do this play!” And, among his cast-mates in John Hudson’s production, he wasn’t alone. The play, a 2008 thriller by American playwright Carter W. Lewis, gives us a couple of normal, smart, caring parents whose teenage son and girlfriend have been busted for having a gun at school. That’s just the starting point; startling events ensue and suspense mounts. Hudson picked it a good year before the world shuddered at the name Newtown. But still …

After the jolt, Mertz, Coralie Cairns and Karyn Mott, along with Hudson, reconsidered. In a post-Columbine, post-Newtown, post-post-post-world, “it’s good to have that conversation. … It’s something a lot of Canadians don’t get to have. It’s topical, it’s current, and all the characters have facets,” says Mertz. They’re layered beyond the surface expectations of “the bitchy controlling mother, the passive father and the surly girlfriend.” And the play, too, goes beyond the scary pairing of “gun” and “school” to probe the complexities of relationships — maritally, romantically and parentally.

If Mertz, a friendly, articulate sort, is particularly intrigued to discover how Canadians will react, it’s perhaps because he’s one of relatively recent vintage, regarding the turbulence of his home country from an unexpected vantage point. The Pittsburgh native emigrated here in the summer of 2009 “for love,” when his partner got a teaching gig at the University of Alberta. “I can’t believe I drink tea in the morning, before my coffee,” he says. “If anyone had ever told me. …” He draws the line at switching from Starbucks to Timmy Ho’s.But other things happened, too. “I wasn’t going to come. But this has been the greatest thing for me!” declares Mertz, an actor/director who is, additionally, the director of the Citadel’s Foote Theatre School, some 300 students strong. What he left was a teaching job in the University of Pittsburgh drama department, four years in New York, then the obligatory heartbreak of L.A. What he brought across the border was an impressively variegated resume that includes “featured extra” in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. “I was dressed as a sailor, part of a couple with a woman in ’40s clothes, cherry earrings, in a restaurant scene.”Adventures, including managing a showbiz hangout restaurant in L.A. with his best friend, seemed to follow on a “sure, why not?” basis, the self-deprecating way Mertz tells it. “I wanted to go into law, as a way into politics. Yup, I wanted to be a politician. How many kids say that? I only took acting because I thought it was good training for a lawyer,” he grins. “My only exposure to theatre as a kid growing up in Pittsburgh was the Knickerty Knockerty Players.”

Suddenly, he was in theatre school, at Park Point College in his hometown, landing leading roles even as a freshman. He got cast in a zany musical, impersonating Cagney and Bogart in The History of the American Film. Suddenly he was working touring shows, like Big BadBurlesque, out of New York. And suddenly he was teaching a dialect class, and loving it.

That’s how he landed his first Edmonton assignments, too, leading dialect workshops and coaching speech at the Citadel, including the sonic complexities of the London class system for A Christmas Carol, and Americanese for A Few Good Men. He starts teaching a speech class at the U of A this week, too. “Canadians always think they have no dialect,” he grins.

“My first professional production in Canada (as an actor) was August Osage County at the Citadel,” Mertz says happily of sharing the stage with some of the country’s acting elite. “I thought OK. Wow. What a way to start!” Every time he’s worked with indie companies in Old Strathcona, it’s been for very off-centre plays, like Northern Light’s creepy Pervert, and Shadow’s superb production of the Kafkaesque chiller The Unseen.

Evie’s Waltz, his third foray onto the Varscona stage, takes him back, in a disturbing way, to the country he left three years ago. The dad he plays is “the peacekeeper, the parent who mediates between the troubled 16-year-old and the mother. … He wants everything to be the same as it always was.”

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